Main menu

UK Electoral Systems

UK Electoral Systems

Parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom should be seen as a
referendum on the performance of sitting MPs, not merely as a snapshot
nationwide opinion poll determining party voting weights for the next
Parliament. The electoral system affects the degree to which voters
may hold their representatives to account for their actions in the
previous Parliament; changes which would diminish this accountability
mechanism should be resisted.

The UK presently has a legislature whose unelected chamber better
reflects the relative strength of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal
Democrat and None of the Above parties. Conversely, if Labour and the
Conservatives each won 50% of the vote, the other chamber would have a
sizable Labour majority. 51% of the seats in the Lower House delivers
100% of the power, and this can be captured by Labour on about 40% of
the vote. Nevertheless, whenever Labour runs into opposition from the
chamber which, in any other context, would be described as more
"representative" by people who go in for that kind of thing, it
threatens to force its legislation through under the Parliament Acts,
on the grounds that the Lower House is more "democratic".

The Lower House is more democratic.

Contrary to the self-serving views of the Liberal
Democrats and other jejune supporters of electoral "reform",
what matters for democracy is not representativeness or
proportionality, so much as accountability and
responsiveness. When MPs behave in accordance with their
constituents' wishes, this is to be preferred to their
merely existing in party groupings of such sizes as best
reflect their constituents' choices at the previous
election.

When discussing electoral reform in the UK, retaining a
"constituency link" is often posited as a requirement. That
is to say, it is felt to be necessary that everyone should
have an MP who is in some sense "theirs", normally meaning
that people are grouped into geographical areas and each
area gets its own MP. A weaker version of this permits
multiple MPs for each area. This is supposed to be good
because it means that there's automatically someone in
Parliament to go to with one's grievances. There is a much
better reason why it happens to be good.

If we merely say that everyone must have one or a small
number of MPs, that does not imply that every MP must have
his own constituency. The German federal electoral system
and its antipodean imitator in New Zealand affords MPs who
have no constituencies: they are elected from party lists
and assigned in such numbers as ensure that the proportion
of MPs in each party in the chamber match the proportion of
the vote each party won. This category of MPs shares the
same vice as MPs in a chamber fully elected by a
proportional system: they can't be voted out of office
directly.

If your MP decides to go against the wishes of his
constituents, they can contact him and say, "Hi, your
majority at the last election was 2000; we, the undersigned
1001 who voted for you last time will vote against your
party next time unless you buck the whip on this issue we
care about." The easier it is to do this, the more likely
the behaviour of an MP will reflect the wishes of
constituents.

Don't believe the canard about votes not counting: every
vote against the person who won counts against his majority
and makes him more susceptible to pressure from his
constituents before the next election.

The electoral system can restrain this tactic. It works
well under First Past The Post, and similar
systems. Generally, increasing the number of MPs who
represent a single constituency has the effect of making
this tactic harder, as the punishment from electors may be
spread across several MPs, especially if the electors cannot
choose which MPs from a paricular party get the benefit of
their vote. This is a notorious problem with the European
Parliamentary elections in Great Britain: if some MEP is the
ringleader for a particularly odious policy, she cannot
easily be voted out without voting out the colleagues from
her party. Even when a free choice on the preferential
ordering of MPs is permitted, it is difficult to stop the
disliked MP from riding back to election on the coattails of
his more popular colleagues.

So, in order of preferability, the electoral systems rank
as follows:

First Past The Post, and Alternative Vote

Single Transferable Vote in multimember constituencies

Proper Proportional Representation systems with open lists

Proper Proportional Representation systems with closed lists

Having said all this, it must be stressed that electoral
reform for the House of Commons should not be considered in
isolation from the composition of the other chamber, and the
relation between the Commons and three other institutions:
the executive, the House of lords, and the courts.

Some notes:

Alternative Vote is the Australian name for a system
which when used in single-member constituencies is identical
to STV: electors rank the candidates in order of preference,
and the least popular candidate is repeatedly eliminated
until someone has over 50%; essentially, once a candidate is
eliminated, a vote is regarded as counting for whichever
remaining candidate was most preferred by its caster. The
effect of this system tends to be obliteration of extremists
without penalising or "wasting" protest votes.

It should be noted that in the British debate,
"Proportional Representation" is used to mean proper PR
systems and STV/AV. The Australian Electoral
Commission used to have an excellent webpage with a
classification of all the electoral systems used in
Australia's twenty-odd legislative chambers, but they've
apparently improved it off their site now.

Other fallacious views on electoral systems which it is
useful to rebut at this juncture include the contention that
FPTP entrenches a two-party system (in fact, the number of
parties is contingent on the geographical concentration of
voters), that AV in the UK in 1997 would have led to a
larger Labour majority (only if you didn't tell people and
the parties what the electoral system was in advance,
otherwise the parties would have behaved differently), and
that geographical constituencies are a relic of a bygone age
and are being replaced by PR across Europe, or at least the
world. FPTP is described by Hilaire Barnett in her militantly
Anglosceptic tome on the British constitution as "still"
existing in some dusty English-speaking corners of the
planet; in fact some countries using PR have been moving
towards constituencies: Italy did in the 1990s, and the
Dutch are considering a similar move.